What NLP & Text Analytics Companies Got Funded in 2015?

Who got funded, and for what?

Good sector research — tracking those questions and also the demand-side market opportunity — is the foundation for smart-money investment. And it’s good research that guides savvy product developers and marketers who have to square technical possibility with competitive market reality. Someone has to be willing to pay for what you’re building and selling, whether that someone is an investor who’s anticipating future profits or (even better!) a customer who likes and needs your work.

So it pays to follow the money, to track investment and M&A activity, and see what insights and trends you can infer.

In natural language processing (NLP) and text and sentiment analysis — as in other tech spaces — investment funds technology productization, company building, and market entry and expansion. Academic and government research funding is important, but it’s angel, VC, institutional, and acquisition money that’s a best indicator of growth directions. It’s that money — investment in emerging text analytics players — that I’ve tracked, for 2015 just as in previous years.

Here is my compilation, with overlapping/adjacent fields including natural language processing (NLP), search, and semantic applications part of the mix. I include brief elaboration and link to sources. Where you place your bets is up to you.

Follow the Money: 2015 Investments in NLP and Text and Sentiment Analysis

I’ll preface my list by offering industry and application focal points, a set of points that is unsurprisingly headed by analysis of online and social media followed, equally unsurprisingly, by funding toward broadly-usable tech tools, which are split out in two forms as second and third on my focal-point list. My categorization of 2015 funding and acquisition events is as follows:

three break out as having a customer experience/consumer insights focus (Medallia, NewBrandAnalytics, OdinText)

two specialize in legal information (Lex Machina, FiscalNote)

one involves office tools (Equivio)

one focuses on personality profiling (Receptiviti)

one focuses on financial news (Clueda), and

two I’ll break out as early-stage startups (Semantile, Ingen.io)

That’s a broad distribution, and yes, I’m double-counting TEMIS. It’s also a distribution that doesn’t include any home runs. If you’re looking for a billion dollar IPO, don’t pin your hopes on text analytics, although per my May, 2015 VentureBeat article, Where are the text analytics unicorns?, a few solution focused, text-analytics reliant companies are on break-out track (namely Medallia and Clarabridge; Sprinklr too). Plus NLP is at the core of just-about everything Google and Baidu do and much of Facebook’s, IBM’s, Amazon’s, and Microsoft’s businesses.

“MonkeyLearn is a machine learning platform on the cloud that allows software companies and developers to easily extract actionable data from text,” a spin-off of development shop Tryolabs. The company took $250 thousand in seed funding, adding to $300 thousand in 2014 seed funding. (May 27, 2015)

Clueda AG, a German financial news analysis specialist, sold itself in May 2015 to Baader Bank AG. Clueda was founded in 2012, applying cognitive methods to real-time text analysis.

NarrativeDx took $650 thousand in seed funding in June, followed by $718 thousand in debt financing in July, according to CrunchBase. (June 8, 2015) (I suspect the $800 thousand seed funding listed is a duplication.) The start-up applies NLP for sentiment analysis to patient surveys, social media, and other material.

I’ll add that my count is that of these thirty-eight, twenty-six are US based, nine have their homes in Europe, and one each is Argentine, Canadian, and Israeli.

Related

But that’s not all. Many companies apply third-party text analytics as a core part of their product line, Coveo and Ontotext, listed below, among them. By contrast, Clarabridge and IBM have proprietary text analytics and made buys that expand platform capabilities, in social analytics and search relevance, respectively.

“Coveo, a recognized leader in intelligent search, has secured $35 million in Series D financing to fund the company’s aggressive growth,” according to a company press release. While Coveo relies on outside NLP software, we’re in close-enough territory for inclusion here. (November 5, 2015)

The parent of graph database vendor Ontotext, which has strong text analytics capabilities, albeit like Coveo’s sourced from outside (the GATE project), went public on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange. That’s Sirma Group Holding. (November 23, 2015)

That’s it for my run-down of 2015 investment and M&A activity in NLP and text analytics. Thanks for reading, and please do tip me off to any activity I’ve missed. And for additional insights, for the year to come, see my 2016 technology and market directions assessment, Text, Sentiment & Social Analytics in the Year Ahead: 10 Trends.

I would like to correct a misunderstanding. Ontotext does develop own text analytics tools. Ontotext does use some components of Gate, but the ML algorithms for entity recognition and disambiguation, document classification, content recommendation, sentiment analysis, relation extraction,etc. are all developed by Ontotext, for various languages.

Revealed Context, a spin off of long time social intelligence leader Converseon, also took investment. The ConveyAPI machine learning technology provides advance enrichment of social and other voice of customer data. Dataweek top innovator in social data mining.